


sleepless

by moondrift



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time & Explorers of Darkness & Explorers of Sky
Genre: 30yrs into the future, Cresselia is anxious, Darkrai has amnesia, Discussions of ethics and philosophy, Gen, Lore - Freeform, Mild Injury, Nightmares, Post-Game, Post-Mystery Dungeon Explorer's of Sky, Trust Issues, assumes the player character was a shinx and the partner was a chimchar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23470399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moondrift/pseuds/moondrift
Summary: Cresselia is asked to accompany an amnesiac Darkrai on a rescue mission while Infernape and Luxray are called away. She does not enjoy one minute of it. For multiple reasons. Not least of which out of fear he might suddenly remember his past intentions.She soon realizes the situation is entirely out of her control.
Relationships: Cresselia & Darkrai
Comments: 7
Kudos: 43





	sleepless

**Author's Note:**

> Fulfilling a childhood dream of mine, some 11 years later. I played these games as a child and they are close and dear to my heart. I've always wanted to know what would happen if the Player's Team managed to befriend Darkrai in a dungeon post-game, as this is something you can actually do. This is my take on the aftermath of that.
> 
> Feedback is welcomed and appreciated. If anyone wants to see more, let me know.

“You want me to- **_what?"_**

Infernape flinched at the shrillness of her voice. 

“You- you must be joking. I can’t go into a mystery dungeon with- with  _ him _ !”

The Infernape rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. He didn’t quite meet her eye, much to her distress. A bad, terrible sign. “It’s only for one afternoon, Cresselia. My partner and I will be gone for at least a day. This request is time-sensitive and everyone else is busy. We won’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“But-!”

“I know you’re not comfortable around Darkrai, but...” he glanced over his shoulder to where Luxray had curled up, tail hooked over his nose in his nest. Luxray’s eyes were closed but Cresselia knew he wasn’t sleeping. “He doesn’t remember who he was, Cresselia. Darkrai is experiencing the same thing my partner went through when we first met. He’s a blank slate. He barely remembers how our world operates! Who else could we trust him with?” He turned back to Cresselia, eyes steadfast but pleading. “Please, Cresselia.”

* * *

And that was how Cresselia found herself in a dungeon with the pokemon of Nightmares.  _ Oh _ , curse her soft heart! She’d known Infernape since he was a Chimchar and she looked into his pleading eyes... it was so hard to say no!

The dungeon itself was unremarkable in every way. She had no reason to feel anxious. She had traversed liminal spaces like it, alone, many times over. She was confident she could take care of herself. But with her traveling companion ...   
  
It just wasn’t right. She tried, she tried her best to see the situation as Infernape saw it but she couldn’t. Darkrai may have lost his memory, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous. It only made him less predictable. 

And so she found herself caught between a constant crawling under her skin and something hot and uncomfortable in her throat. As long as Darkrai didn’t speak, she could ignore him, ignore her unease, and focus on their quest. Thankfully, for the most part, he didn’t speak, which made the journey somewhat bearable. 

But as all things do, the silence didn’t last.   
  
“You’re bleeding.”    
  
Cresselia sucked in a breath, barely able to contain a squeak. When she turned she found Darkrai hovering a few paces behind her, staring at her side intently. Alarmingly, closer than she expected him to be. 

It was a small cut, really. It stung mildly but she had been able to ignore it until now. 

“I’m fine!” She snapped. “Really! Oh, where is that oran berry, I could have sworn I had another...”   
  
“Your wounds will get infected.” Darkrai drawled. “You will faint.”   
  
His words were so cold. If his tone hadn’t been so flat she might have assumed he was taunting her. 

Cresselia physically felt her patience drain down the gutter. She wasn’t bleeding out and she wasn’t about to faint! She was fine, thank you very much.“Again, I am fine! Now where-” Cresselia did not consider herself to be a clumsy creature, she thought herself graceful and elegant. And yet she fumbled with her bag and lost her grip. The contents came tumbling free. She watched in dismay as they spilled all over the dungeon floor. Oh. Oh, dear.    
  
She drifted to the ground to pick up her items but as she reached for them a sharp pain made her gasp. 

Movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention then, and combating nausea she twisted to find Darkrai had drifted closer again.  
  
“I’ll get it myself!” 

Darkrai froze. Cresselia held her breath.

Darkrai’s cyan eyes stared blankly ahead, claws outstretched, hoving over the many pebbles that she had dropped.

Slowly he lifted his eyes to meet her’s. Cresselia’s heart rabbited in her chest. The world seemed to close in on her, shrinking in size until all that stood in that dark cavernous dungeon was Darkrai and herself. The bright light of the moon swallowed by a starless night.

Cyan blue was all she could focus on. She didn’t dare move. She didn’t dare breathe. She felt as though she were staring into the depths of a glacial. 

Slowly, Darkrai backed away.    
  
Cresselia looked away from him and quickly reclaimed the contents of her bag. She counted out her belongings but found no oran berry to speak of. The silence unnerved her.   
  
“... I have a few sitrus berries left.”    
  
She glanced up at him warily. “I am sure I’ll be fine without them,” She said. “Yes, I’m sure we’ll find more somewhere.”   
  
His brow furrowed. “That is... irrational. I have three left. There’s no sense in waiting until we find more. Use it now so we can be fit to defend ourselves.”   
  
A bead of sweat crawled down her neck. It was difficult to argue with that logic but... “N-nonsense. We should save them for emergencies. I just need to walk it off. That’s right! If we just walk for a bit, I’m sure I’ll feel better.” She nodded to herself and turned to do just that.    
  
And yet, not a few paces, a sharp piercing pain halted her. “Ow, ow-” Overcome by sudden dizziness, her body swung sidewise. And she became aware of something warm trickling down her wing. “Oh,” Cresselia said aloud, as a spot of red plinked on the ground below her. “Oh.”   
  
“I told you. You  _ will _ pass out.” She hadn’t even noticed the mass of shadows moving, now they accumulated in her periphery. Plumes of smoke and white ash. A crown of sanguine. She inhaled sharply. “Take the berry.” He held it out for her. The flesh of the fruit seemed so frail in his claws.   
  
Suddenly, a static hiss erupted from the nightmare pokemon. He collided with her and sent them both careening into the wall. Cresselia, without thinking and truly fearing for her life retaliated. He was so close she feared he would go for her throat but the brunt of her attack met empty air as he flinched away from her.

Darkrai, his eyes uncharacteristically wide, dove away from her, and something molten streaked through the space where they had once stood. The impact sent shards of rock flying, glazing her cheek and dust clouding her eyes. 

Realizing she had the wrong opponent, Cresselia flung herself to the side. But she didn’t have much time to think, much less look for Darkrai. 

The other pokemon struck again, a Haunter, she finally saw now, much too late. 

Cresselia cried out. Her cheek collided with the ground. Tiny stones dig into her skin. Then the world went black.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
There was grass beneath her. A soft breeze caressed her cheek. Cressellia opened her eyes to a meadow of wildflowers. It was quiet but beautiful. She listened to the tree’s whisper and oh,  _ oh  _ how the warm and soothing the sun felt across her back.   
  
She couldn’t name what had awoken her, but all seemed well. Cresselia laid her head to rest amidst the wildflowers. She decided, without thinking much at all, that she would listen to the wind for a while. Take a nap perhaps, while the birds sang.   
  
The flowers swayed in the wind, a slow rhythmic lullaby. The hills whispered. But it seemed too quiet, she thought. 

Cresselia frowned as she opened her eyes.    
  
The colors of the meadow somehow looked... saturated. Dimmer. But that didn’t make sense. How could a meadow change color? There must be something wrong with her eyes. The world couldn’t change so.   
  
Taking in the swaying meadow that surrounded her, she listened again to the wind and to the whispering hills. But the longer she listened the more hollow the wind became. And the rustling of leaves and grass stilted. She heard words. Many words at once. A frantic conversation hissed through clenched teeth at the bottom of a gully.

Her heart skipped a beat.

It started with a single blade of grass. A spect of white trickled down a layline, washing every vein in a deep shade of grey. The phenomena spread. From a trickle to a gush, and soon a flood. Cresselia took to the air, alarm blossoming in her chest as the meadow beneath her faded into monotone. The trees bent in the wind and then held their position, cowed into submission by the dark and the cold and last rays of sunlight vanished from the sky.   
  
All around her the world stood still.   
  
_ Common sense _ promptly abandoned her.    
  
Cresselia took off. She flew over the forest and across the meadow but no matter how far she flew the landscape didn’t change. She found a Butterfree frozen in flight, wings captured in a downward stroke. She found a Deerling mid-leap, wide smile glassy and still. The longer she stared, the wider the smile grew. Worse, was the Ratatata, a seed in its paws, mouth opened wide. While above, a Staraptor loomed, it’s talons outstretched, hooked beak parted in a scream.    
  
Their eyes followed her as she fled.    
  
This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening!   
  
_ The time gears. _ She needed to find the time gears. They needed to be returned to the tower where they belonged. 

But the world seemed so far away. Her body felt heavy, while her mind felt untethered and the more she fought against it, the weaker her body became. As though wading through tar her every movement came to a crawl. 

She felt a presence behind her, reaching.   
  
The sky grew dark. The shadows stretched their fingers, wrapping in a chokehold around the last bit of light left in the world. Bit by bit, white went grey. Grey went black. Black melted together, larger and larger until Cresselia was confronted with a single mass. The abyss unhinged it’s jaw. Dropped low, and the absence of light shone over rows and rows of sanguine teeth.   
  
She couldn’t breathe.  _ She couldn’t breathe. _ _   
_   
“Cresselia, wake up!”  
  
A ripple shot through the darkness and she found herself somewhere else. The meadow was gone and the pokémon with it. She was alone again but not entirely.

The shadows gave way to fog and through the non-light she could see the landscape for what it was. A dream. She had been caught in a bad dream.

“Have you come to your senses?” the voice asked again. She turned to find Darkrai, the real one, eying her warily. He kept his distance and for that she was grateful. It was surprisingly considerate of him.

“What have you done?” Her voice rose a pitch. “Why am I here? How is this possible? your nightmares shouldn’t have any effect on me.”

“This is not my doing,” he said, stunning her. He gestured to their surroundings, and what Cresselia had originally thought to fog, she realized was actually steam. Heat seethed from the ground, bubbling and gurgling. Through thick plumes of white, she saw the watery outline of three pokémon. “You conjured this nightmare yourself after you were knocked unconscious.”

He was watching the figures too, with what she thought was genuine curiosity. This image of him unsettled her more than the nightmare version had. It didn’t fit what she knew of him. It was unlike the kind of expression she would expect from the pokémon she spent so long hunting. 

“But how...” Then it hit her. She remembered the Haunter, vaguely, and she remembered striking Darkrai afterward.  _ Oh.  _ “I-I don’t know what came over me.”

Oh, this was  _ bad _ .  _ This was really, really bad.  _

If Darkrai saw the contents of her dreams it might trigger the return of his memories. He might revert back to his previous motives. With Infernape and Luxray gone, neck deep in a dungeon... she swallowed. He could very easily get rid of her and cover it up. 

But he wasn’t watching the memory, he was watching her. “...you are afraid of me.” Her heart stopped.

“Why?”

She swallowed and forced a laugh. “I’m not sure where you are getting that idea. We are both dream Pokémon are we not? What reason would I have to be afraid of you.”

He tilted his head. The smoke and fog rising from his body rolled in a way Cresselia perceived as agitated. “I know fear. Even now, I can taste it. I can feel your fear pulsating. I frighten you. But how can that be? It is as you say, we are both dream pokemon. So then, why are you afraid of me?”

Unbridled, and quite without her consent, the dream around them changed. In place of fog rose volcanic stone, pools of magma and bubbling molten rivers. 

“Let’s continue our conversation elsewhere!” Cresselia said urgently. She flew closer to him, in the hopes that she might distract him from the image below. He drew back, a wary few feet, but his cyan eyes were not on her, they were on the scenery below.

“That’s you,” He said. “You have been here before.”

“Yes but it was so long ago,” she admitted quickly. “Let’s go, if you please. I'd rather not linger in my own mind.”

He hedged around her before she could stop him, observing the two pokemon she was traveling with. Chimchar and Shinx. They looked so young back then. So little.   
  
Cresselia of the past stood in the center of the crater, Chimchar and Shinx at her side, and just as before, the moment they thought they were alone Cresselia called out to him and Darkrai of the past revealed himself. Startling the three of them. Cresselia watched in dismay as her memory replayed the events of the past exactly as they had occurred. 

The fight had been brutal. Cresselia couldn’t have hoped to face Darkrai alone, nevermind with the support of other pokemon. Without Chimchar and Shinx, she wouldn’t have stood a chance.

She watched her past-self take a hit for Chimchar and crumble. She remembered that moment vividly. With no revivers seeds left and not an oran berry to spare, those last moments had been gut-wrenching, even now she felt sick. Darkrai rose above her, shadowball between his claws. Cresselia, too weak to move, had laid there waiting for the inevitable. She remembered the expression on his face. The sadistic glee in his eye. Just in the nick of time, Shinx threw himself between her and the attack. It was because of him she survived that day.

“I was trying to kill you,” Darkrai murmured. “Why would I want to kill you?”

Cresselia couldn’t possibly answer that question. “Please, Darkrai. Let’s leave this place. There’s nothing to be gained from this!”

He didn’t move.

Chimchar opened his mouth, his fangs red hot. Flames drew up from his throat and for once, Darkrai had not been fast enough to dodge. He was struck low.

Darkrai of the present watched the scene, revated, cyan eyes locked on Chimchar and his past-self. Cresselia knew what happened next. She couldn’t let him see it. If by any stroke of luck he somehow didn’t put the pieces together now, after Palkia appeared he surely would. 

“Darkrai!” She cried. “I promise I’ll explain! I swear by the moon I will but please don’t watch this!” She placed herself between him and the memory forcing him to look her in the eyes. “This memory is not yours to watch!”

He stared through her. Behind her, there was a deep reverberating crackle. 

In a blink, they were back in the cavern in the waking world.

For a moment they regarded each other in silence. Cresselia unsure of what to say, searching his expression for any sign of recognition. Any sign that he remembered, but in his eyes she only found confusion. A deep brooding tension. Wariness. And most surprising of all, fear. 

For all she had regarded him with mistrust, he had put an equal amount of faith in her, Infernape and Luxray. And with this realization, her heart tinged with guilt. 

Alone. Afraid. Met with a world of pokémon hostile to him without ever knowing why. How brutal and cruel this world must seem to him. And had they done anything to assuage this fear? No. They had kept him hidden from it, inevitably validating his fear. 

“You weren’t dreaming.” He said at least, quiet. It really wasn’t a question. She swallowed. “That was a memory.” He stared at her, cyan eyes burning. “You knew me in the past. That’s why you don’t trust me now.”   
  
“Yes,” She couldn’t deny that. “But, it's not what you think.”   
  
“Why,” he asked again, hoarse, his words stilled her heart. “Why was I trying to kill you? What did I think I would gain from it?”   
  
“I- I can’t tell you that.”   
  
“Why not?” he snapped. “You must know. You were there.”   
  
“I honestly couldn’t say. The reasons behind your actions were...  _ incomprehensible  _ to us.”   
  
She steeled herself. She knew what Infernape and Luxray would have wanted her to do. To ensure the world’s peaceful future and to give Darkrai a chance to live in it, they had to keep the truth of his past a secret. And yet she hesitated.

She would have continued, she would have said something along the lines of ‘you’ve changed. you are a different pokémon now, then you were.’ But then she thought about it. It seemed like the appropriate thing to say for what her intentions were, but was it the truth? 

For a moment she thought about it. She really thought about it. 

Cresselia tried to remember when she first met Darkrai, but found the memory clouded from time. Before the Time Gears, before the World of Darkness, there had been a time when Darkrai’s name meant very little to her.

And if she looked back as far as she could remember, Cresselia would recall a time when she was young. When the world was new. She could only faintly recall the Dreamer. The pokémon who dreamt of the moon and of them in turn. She couldn't remember the Dreamer themselves, as the memory had been lost to time and neither she nor Darkrai had known them for long enough for any lasting influence to stick.    
  
The Dreamer, naturally dreamt and the nature of the first dream was a matter of some debate. As the Dreamer hadn’t yet had another, they had no means of contextualizing a dream as good or bad. For the second dream, however, they had context.

The first time she met him, Darkrai had told her he believed the first dream to have been a nightmare. His logic stated that for the Dreamer to know what a good dream meant they must first understand terror. One couldn’t know what peace and happiness were without first having known fear and suffering. If one didn’t know pain, how could they know relief? Therefore, the natural state of the world was strife.

Cresselia thought he was wrong back then and still thought he was wrong now. To know what a bad dream meant, one must first know happiness. Fear was the threat of having something taken away. Fear could not exist without hope and peace. And so, the natural state of the world was contentment.

In the end, the argument had been left unresolved. 

More pokemon came to be and Darkrai’s nature, as she knew it, came to light. For every good dream there was a nightmare somewhere. The Dreamreaper came and took the light and joy and left in its place the cold-dark. Cresselia lulled the pain he left behind and chased the shadows away from the helpless. But the world had been new, and for every dream he ate, and for every nightmare she banished, they meant little to each other. They simply were.

She couldn’t remember when that changed. Only that for a long time, they kept to themselves. Time passed quickly yet slowly at once. 

The world of darkness... the destruction of time. Those things had only happened recently, relatively speaking. And Cresselia realized now that she had spent so long trying so hard to foil his plans she couldn’t remember what it had been like Before.

She couldn’t remember Before.

She had never thought to question why he wanted to engulf the world in darkness. It had simply felt right. As one never questions why the sun rises, only knows it’s passage across the sky to be true and certain, so too did Cresselia never question Darkrai’s desire.

But now how could she reconcile the two who stood before her? 

“A person’s nature doesn’t change. That’s what I believed. Until recently, I never thought to consider otherwise. I believed that, no matter what, the kind of person you are will always stay fundamentally the same. But... now I... I have reason to doubt that philosophy.” She took a breath. Meeting his eyes, she forced herself to continue, unnerved by the vulnerability she saw in his gaze. 

“It is your nature to consume dreams just as it was your nature to be cunning and wicked, or so I thought. But now, without your memory, you act differently. You’re not the Darkrai I thought I knew. Were my assumptions wrong initially? I thought, if you were acting differently then it must be a trick, a ploy to make us believe you were vulnerable. To gain our trust and get rid of us one final time. I wanted to believe that because it meant I was right. But I realize now that wasn’t the case. So now I must ask myself, did your nature change? Or have I misjudged it from the beginning? I don’t have the answer. And that’s why... that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to trust you.”

“...” Darkrai’s cyan eyes flint down, away from her to his claws. “I understand now, why I may have wanted to kill you.”

“...what?”

His gaze drifted to her alarmed expression but he didn’t otherwise move. “Don’t misunderstand. I don’t have a desire to. You are... undeniably clever, Cresselia. That must be why.” He glanced off to the side. He watched something she couldn’t see and it made her nervous. 

“Did you remember something?” She asked, tentatively.

“No. I’m thinking,” a pause. Then he met her eyes again and she started. “I wonder... is it within our natures to orbit each other? Whatever I had wanted to do... you were attempting to stop me, weren’t you?”

A shiver ran down her spine as she held his gaze. Yet another reason he frightened her. Even without his memory, his guess work was terrifying in its accuracy. How long could they keep the truth from him? 

“That’s true,” she reluctantly admitted. “I was. We did. You weren’t... a good person, Darkrai.”

There was a long pause as he considered what she had told him. Cresselia, though silently grateful the conversation seemed to have calmed him, found the dance utterly exhausting. 

“You say I’ve changed, that I’m different now. But I wonder if that’s really true.”

_ Oh by the moon. _ “Why do you say that?”   
  
“If you are questioning now whether or not you understood my nature, what reason do you have to believe I’ve changed? It’s possible I am the same as I was before.”

“That’s... true,” Cresselia hesitantly admitted. “But that’s not the only reason I have to believe that.”

He didn’t speak, watching her. She continued. “Infernape and Luxuray believe you’ve changed too. I have seen the way you interact with them. You enjoy spending time with them. I saw you smile, once.” She flushed. She, herself, was embarrassed by the imaginary. It was such a surreal thing to witness. A moment she wasn’t meant to see. “The Darkrai I knew never smiled, except to the pain of others. And now I know you’ve changed because the Darkrai I once knew would never have had a conversation like this with me. I was wrong to doubt you. I let my fear blind me.”

She allowed the conversation to dwindle and Darkrai was quiet for a time. “I still don’t understand. Despite what I tried to do...” His eyes narrowed in concentration and for a moment she feared he might remember something, but he shook his head. “I can’t remember. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember. I tried to kill those two as cubs... Despite that, they have treated me with nothing but kindness.”   
  
“You sound angry.”   
  
His gaze sharpened but he didn't look at her, too distracted by his own thoughts. “I am. I wouldn’t be so forgiving. I don’t understand their compassion. It’s incomprehensible to me.”   
  
“I’m not sure I would call it forgiveness,” he looked at her. “Infernape and Lururary are noble pokemon. They didn’t think it was right to leave you where they found you. They would be no better than common criminals if they left a wounded pokemon to fend for themselves. And after you came to live with them they came to understand you, somewhat.” 

Here she hesitated. It wasn't her place to say so, after all. Before, she hadn’t felt she should agree, but now... Maybe it was something he needed to hear. Maybe it was something she needed to say to keep this peace between them.   
  
“You may not understand it but... don’t take their kindness for granted. Don’t dismiss it as frivolous. I think we should all strive to be kind for the sake of it.” She looked at him, really looked at him, and for the first time felt a tinge of pity. He didn’t get it. “I think, all they want from you is their kindness passed forward.”

“I think we started off on the wrong side of the moon,” Cresselia hedged after another moment or two. “Let’s start over. I’m Cresselia, Dreamweaver and Moonlight. And you are...?”

He snorted. “Beside myself with pain. Please, never introduce yourself again.”

Cresselia gasped. She opened her mouth, positively nettled until she realized he was smiling, just a little bit, and she huffed instead.

* * *

  
  


In the end they were able to complete their request in a timely manner. The client never caught sight of Darkrai and left satisfied.

“How did it go?” Infernape asked her when he and Luxray returned, smiling at what he saw. “You seem to be in better spirits than when you left. Were you able to talk things out with Darkrai?”

She sighed but smiled in return. “I was. But... I’m afraid that In the process I had to confess some truths.”

His brow furrowed, flames crackling anxiously. “What do you mean?”

She looked over the beach to where Luxray was talking to Darkrai, no doubt having a similar conversation. Compared to her experience with him, Darkrai seemed to be at ease in Luxray’s presence. But then, it was hard to feel uneasy with the feline. Somehow, his aura made one feel safe. 

“There was an incident.” She took a breath. “He came close to discovering the truth. It was only out of his faith in us that I was able to avert disaster. But to get to that point I had to tell him fragments of what happened between us; that the three of us knew him in the past and the fact that he took actions against us.”

She tore her eyes away from the beach. She held Infernape’s gaze. He shared her worry. “We can’t keep the truth from him indefinitely. If he doesn’t find out from us, he will from someone else.” 

“I know. Luxray and I have talked about it before...” his eyes were pained. “Maybe it’s selfish of us to want this. I know there are, were, pokémon out there who would want justice. I think if we were to ever see Grovyle again he would have that opinion. But when I look at him now I can’t see the Darkrai who tried to trick us. It’s easy to forget he’s the same Pokémon.” He was quiet for a moment as his gaze wandered down the shore, to where his partner was.

“And you know, I thought about it when you were gone. If he regained his memories we would have to do something to hold him responsible. But how do we hold a Pokémon responsible for something that hasn’t technically taken place? We prevented the planet’s paralysis. We stopped him. Palkia stripped him of his memories. Isn’t that enough?”

Infernape glances down at his paws, saddened. “I can’t imagine what it would be like. Imagine you had a life, friends, family, things you cared about. And someone took those memories, took those precious things, things that had only ever been yours away from you. In a way, it’s like someone took your life away without ending it.”

To some capacity, Cresselia agreed but felt the need to point something out; “It’s naive to think this is our decision to make alone. Darkrai may have targeted you and Luxray directly but his actions affected everyone. I think some of us have the right to be angry.” 

Infernape nodded. “I know. Another thing that bothers me is that while Darkrai may be different now, can he really atone for what he did if he doesn’t remember it? You can’t make up for the mistakes you’ve made if you’re not aware you’ve made them.”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” Cresselia admitted. “In any case, it may be out of our control for now.”

Infernape hummed in agreement, unsettled. Together they watched the incoming tide.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> edited* 11/20/2020


End file.
